Daily Archives: 24 February, 2011

There are two main concerns about the safety of vaccines: the MMR vaccine, and the preservative thimerosal.

MMR

For years, there has been some controversy surrounding the MMR vaccine. Responsible parents don’t want to hurt their kids, so if the vaccine causes health problems, we don’t want to subject our kids to it.

In 1998, a respected medical journal, The Lancet, published a paper suggesting a possible link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Then in 2004, The Lancet published a retraction by ten of the paper’s thirteen authors – a retraction because those authors wanted to make it clear that there was not evidence that the vaccine was unsafe; people were misinterpreting the small study’s write-up.

on rare occasions, kids will experience mild swelling of the neck/cheeks about a week after getting the vaccine

1 in 3000 kids will have seizures due to fever (vs. 3-6 in the same sized group who will die from the disease)

some people have joint pain due to the vaccine; it is temporary

1 in 30,000 people have a temporary low platelet count due to the vaccine

Less than one in a million people vaccinated experience a severe allergic reaction due to the vaccine

The alternative is much scarier. Survivors blind, fighting pneumonia, maybe sterile; hundreds of thousands of children dead.

Thimerosal

The MMR vaccine isn’t the only safety question regarding childhood immunizations. The other big issue is that of preservatives, mainly thimerosal.

Obviously it doesn’t help to prevent a given disease (diphtheria, for example), only to have the patient die of a different infection because the medicine was contaminated. If a doctor’s office has a vial that holds twenty doses, then twenty different times a needle will be inserted into the vial and a dose drawn out. In a perfect world, this would always remain sterile; here in the real world, as a safeguard to keep fungi and bacteria from growing in vaccines, small amounts of an antiseptic/preservative were added.

When very few vaccines were available, this wasn’t a significant problem because kids got very little of that preservative. As more and more vaccines became available, the amount of preservative given to young children increased. People became concerned that the accumulated doses might be harmful. The evidence appears to say no, but to err on the side of caution, pharmaceutical companies were asked to stop using this preservative. Some vaccines contain only trace amounts, others have none. For those vaccines that still contain small amounts of this preservative, patients can specifically request thimerosal-free vaccines (single-dose vials as opposed to multi-dose vials).

A look at the data on individual vaccines shows that the vaccines are much safer than the diseases.

Everyone wants what’s best for their children. We dress our kids warmly, teach them to wash their hands, and tell them not to eat slugs or lick the handle of the grocery store’s shopping cart. We feel awful when they’re sick, and wish there was something we could do to reduce their chances of ever contracting another disease.

There is something we can do. Vaccinations are one way to help keep kids healthy, and they’re far less costly than dealing with disease.

Smallpox
Smallpox is considered by some to be the most deadly of all diseases in history. Up to 35% of people who caught smallpox died from their illness. The pox left scars on those who survived, and many people were blinded by the disease. Today, however, we are lucky because the fight to eradicate smallpox was so successful that it’s no longer considered necessary to give this vaccine to children.* With diligent vaccination programs, we can eradicate other diseases, too.

Measles
Imagine a disease so feared and so deadly that parents don’t name their babies. Only after a child has gotten the disease and been lucky enough to survive will the child be named. That’s true of measles in some parts of the world. According to the World Health Organization, measles is the leading cause of vaccine-preventable death in young children. Hundreds of thousands of people die every year. Survivors can experience complications such as blindness, brain swelling, ear infection, pneumonia, and sterility. All this can be prevented with a simple vaccine. One dose is given at age 12-15 months, and a second dose is recommended around age 4-6.

Is the vaccine effective? Consider this graph:

Vaccine efforts around the world have seen similar results. WHO reports that in 2000, 733,000 died from measles. By 2008, that number had decreased to 164,000. In 2009-2010, unfortunately, vaccines were down again and measles cases rose dramatically. When a disease isn’t seen as a threat, people don’t always see the need to have their children immunized. In the U.S., the measles vaccine is combined to protect against measles, mumps, and rubella all in a single shot.

Polio
I’ve written about this recently. People can die from polio. Complications can be terrible for survivors. Although this disease is no longer common, we live in a small world. There have been recent cases of a single unvaccinated traveller contracting polio while on vacation, then returning home before symptoms developed and unknowingly spreading this contagious disease to others in the community. Prevention is simple with a series of four vaccination shots, given at ages 2 months, 4 months, 6-18 months, and 4-6 years.

Diphtheria
Think of the Roaring ’20s: flappers and happy times after the conclusion of the first World War. Sadly, life isn’t wasn’t always as pictured in the movies; in that decade, the United States also saw 13,000-15,000 deaths per year from diphtheria. It’s a terrible disease. We tend to forget, but most people have heard at least a little about diphtheria; some of the traditions seen in the Iditarod are in commemoration of the 1925 serum run to Nome – a race against time due to a diphtheria outbreak. Thanks to vaccines, we no longer need to fear this deadly disease.

Whooping Cough (Pertussis)
Some people think that since this disease is worst in infants, adults don’t need to worry about it. Not true. Adults with whooping cough spread the disease to others, including infants. Last year in California, a number of babies died because they hadn’t been vaccinated yet. That horrible cough must have been terrifying for the parents to hear, knowing there was nothing they could do to help their babies.

I have a friend who had whooping cough as an adult a few years ago, and can testify that it’s no picnic for an adult to have the disease. Childhood vaccinations against whooping cough do not last forever. Boosters are required. Pertussis is one of three diseases included in a single vaccine (the other two being diphtheria and tetanus). The children’s vaccine is called DTaP (or DTP), and the adult boosters are called Tdap).

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The goal of these (and other) vaccines is to give children a longer, healthier life. Vaccines work. They prevent disease and save thousands of lives every year. The question is, though, do they cause other problems? Are vaccines safe?